Productivity Q&A and Videos

Other than for a very specific, time-critical reason, e.g. an upcoming launch or being on-call, is there ever a good reason to "burn the midnight oil" by deviating from one's normal life routine to put in more work hours?

Here's what I see this deviation looking like:

• taking fewer breaks in the day - so instead of going for a walk after 2 hours, doing it after 3
• within a work-bloc, having longer time spent at your desk - so sitting interrupted at your desk for over an hour, for example. If you're following the health gurus, you should be standing up often, and the Pomodoro technique is classically 25-minute focus blocks, but I don't know how practical this is
• cutting out gym time to get more work done - for me, exercise is generally 1 - 1.5 hours of time which I do 3 or 4 times a week, so I can get more keyboard time in if I cut it.
• working later into the night and either cutting into sleep time or just waking up later the next day

These are all examples of trying to eke out more productivity. The last 2 in general are frowned upon from a health-standpoint.

In my case, I'm onboarding and think I'm behind on my first ticket, hence the motivation for my question.

I know quality (spending my time in the right way) is a lot more important than quantity, but quantity is easier to add as so many people have pointed out on this site.

Yesterday, I had a new coworker, someone I had never spoken with before spend 4 hours on the phone with me and that was both practically helpful and psychologically helpful. Getting help like that in general is a lot more productive than just throwing more time alone at a problem. Just trying to add more context.

Thanks!

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Recently I had asked a friend who works in DevX analytics (developer experience analytics) about her work and she mentioned that currently there was no other way to measure developer productivity other than lines of code or how frequent, often, and long someone was coding. Isn’t this a bad measure for productivity? Couldn’t someone just be pushing crap code (copy and paste) that has no substantive value to the team? I also thought about this article by the CTO of Carta that also talks about alignment and other ways to understand substantive and more qualitative measures than quantitative factors to evaluate success and I guess productivity?

How does your company evaluate developer productivity and success and metrics? I’ve found talking to former Meta engineers a lot they tend to have some really specific ways to measure success metrics that seem reasonable.

I am struggling to shift some behavior that is getting in the way of my own career growth and I am hoping to get some insight from others.

My previous manager was a micro-manager and to satisfy him, I ensured that I focussed solely on a few projects a majority of the time. However, my current manager wants to give me room to be as independent as I'd like to be. This means that I now have room to influence and help others, which is fundamental for growth. But now, because I don't have someone asking me for details of how I spend every moment of my time, I question whether any task I do is the highest priority task I should be doing, which takes the joy out of helping/mentoring others, because I know that time can be spent focusing on my own deliverables. This second-guessing is causing a great deal of mental load for me. I also feel like if I ask my manager too often whether I am prioritizing correctly, he might feel like I am not behaving like a senior engineer. Any thoughts on how I can get out of my own way here?

I've heard people say that engineers should learn to cook and not just UberEats and Doordash food all the time. Sounds like a good idea from a health, cost, and relationship-building point of view!

That begs the question of what to cook. Am interested in any ideas! Like all engineers, I don't want to be spending too much time per day doing meal prep, but I'm sure once you do a few recipes a few times you can make them much faster.

Thanks!